Gone
by insanityfare
Summary: Companion to Ghost and Guilty- 27 years and he still had hoped his brother would come home.


**Disclaimer- I do not own **_**The Outsiders**_**.**

He was watching television when Darry came. Some baseball team was playing in Oklahoma City and Sodapop lay back in his arm chair, sipping a beer and hoping they didn't lose. Jenna, his wife was lying on the sofa, reading a magazine. The girls were in their room, asleep. It was quiet and peaceful. He had no way of knowing that his world was about to be turned upside down.

The knock was hard and heavy. Startled, he and his wife jumped. "I'll get it," Jenna said, laying her magazine on the floor. When she opened it and Darry entered uniform on and disheveled, Soda turns the TV off. "Darry, it's good to see you," Jenna said. Darry entered and Jenna closed the door. "What brings you by so late?" She asked.

Soda slid to the edge of his seat. Something wasn't right and he knew it. Darry never came by late at night without calling first and his uniform was never anything but neat.

Darry licked his lips. "Soda, you and I need to talk."

Soda clutched the edge of his chair. Jenna walked by and grabbed his hand. "I'll be in the kitchen if you need me." She said, kissing his cheek and walked off.

Darry takes a deep breath. "Soda, it's about Ponyboy..."

Sodapop's heart raced in his chest. His ears buzzed and his eyes immediately moved to a black and white picture on the wall. His little brother smiled up at him, a smirk on his face, as if laughing at some joke no one ever told.

"Is he coming home? Where did you find him? When I can see him?" Sodapop asked. When his brother went missing, the cops were reluctant to search at first, believed he had run away. Sodapop didn't want to believe them then, but as the years went by, that was all he wanted.

He tried to imagine his brother in a million different places, doing a million different things. He had always talked about wanting to live in the country, out in the places they used to go hunting. Sodapop liked to believe that Ponyboy had a little log cabin, out by a lake with a wife and some kids. Maybe he had some old haunting dogs, but then again, even though he was a good shot, Pony had never liked killing things.

Darry closed his eyes. He shook his head. "Pepsi-Cola… "

The racing in his heart stopped. Darry only called him by that nickname when something bad had happened. It was his dad's way of calming him down. Sodapop shook his head and his fists clinched. _No, please… _

"Soda, I'm sorry little buddy," his voice was so sorrowful. Sodapop could just barely make out it braking. "He's gone."

Gone, Sodapop hated that word. Gone meant never coming back, dead like his mom and dad. Pony couldn't be gone, he just couldn't. "How, when?" Soda could feel himself reeling. There in the back of his mind, he had always known it was a possibility, that his brother would never come home. He had never given them any reason to believe he would have run away. Sure he and Darry had their tiffs, but brothers always fought.

Darry sat down on the edge of the sofa. He popped his knuckles. "We found his body today, up near Oologah Lake. He's been gone the whole time." His stomach curls and Sodapop feels suddenly sick. He had hoped that it was a recent death. It's cruel but wanted it to be a car wreck or something. He wanted his brother to have lived, for even a little while. When Ponyboy first went missing, Sodapop kept telling himself that he could not be dead, that somehow he would have felt it. They were always so close.

He didn't feel the tears coming but come they did. He didn't want to know the whole story, didn't want to know how and why his little brother was taken from him but he had to. "Who," he asked as Jenna came into the room and wrapped her arms around him.

"Are you sure little buddy?" Darry asked him, "You don't have to know."

Sodapop grabbed his wife's hands and held tightly. "No, I do," he said.

"Are you sure?" Darry asked

"No," Sodapop said and he wasn't. "No, but I need to. Tell me everything."

Darry nodded his head and took another deep breath. "A guy came into the office and confessed. He was jumped on his way home from the movies by some Socs. They pulled a blade on him. I think they just meant to scare him but it slipped."

Behind him, Sodapop's wife gasped. Sodapop felt sick. He swallowed back vomit. "Go on," he crocked.

Darry's mouth opened but for a moment no words came out. "They slit his throat," he finally said, "and got scared. They through him in the back of a trunk and he died there. They buried him under some trees near the lake. I guess the guilt finally ate at one of them enough because he told us what happened and where to find him."

Sodapop let go of his wife's hands and clawed at his head. They had slit his throat. Pony had died alone, choking on his own blood, unable to call out to his brothers to help him. He must have been so scared. Sodapop had always been there to help him through his nightmares and the one time his brother really needed him, he wasn't there. Sodapop couldn't take it, he screamed.

"Daddy!" his daughters rushed into the room, still clad in their PJs. They looked around the room with panicked expressions. "Mom," Ivy, the oldest of the twins asked, "what's wrong?"

"Daddy?" Holly asked, stepping forward.

Sodapop barley knew they were there. Jenna walked over and placed her arms around them. "They finally found your Uncle Pony," she said softly, "remember what we talked about?"

Holly moved away from her mother. She walked over to the chair and laid her head on her father's lap. "Its okay daddy, it's going to be okay."

It wasn't though. His brother was dead, someone had murdered his baby brother and just thrown the body away like it was a piece of garbage. There had always been a special bond between them, Sodapop and his little brother. When they were little, he was the only one who could get Ponyboy talking. Even when they had been a little older, nobody could get Ponyboy to open up like Sodapop had.

He used to love to lie in bed and listen to his little brother talk about his hopes and dreams for the future, to tell him his own hopes and dreams. It had been awful having to sleep by himself every night, to throw an arm around his brother only to find he wasn't there. He missed his brother's snarky comments, the tickle fights they had in the mornings, watching him read. He would never see those things again. How could things be okay?

The funeral was, well Sodapop wasn't sure how he made it through. The coffin that held his brother's bones was small and white. It was a closed casket, like their parents' had been, and they had placed a picture of him on top. Darry was the one who had picked it out. It was one of the few pictures that did not show his fourteen year old brother with greased hair. It made him look younger, more innocent. It looked nothing like him.

Sodapop clutched the podium. He was chosen to give the eulogy. Who else could give it? Ponyboy had been close with their little gang, but none of them had known him like Soda had. Sodapop looked out into the crowd.

The gang, minus Dallas, was all there with their families. His own wife was sitting at the front, smiling wearily at him. There were other people there too, some people he knew, and some he didn't. Some of them were older; he assumed they might be teachers from the school.

Sodapop struggled to find the words, like saying goodbye, they seemed so final. He wanted that image back, of Ponyboy out in the country, teaching his kids to swim in a little creek. He wanted to believe, like he had for so long, that any day Pony could come back. They would smile and hug and things would be okay. As the words slipped out of his mouth, it seemed as his little brother was further and further away.

He talked about how tough his little brother had been how he could take anything you through at him, but never mentioned rumbles. Glory to be so short, Pony was a good man to have in a rumble. He talked about how smart his little brother was, the way he had been put up a grade and loved to read. Sodapop had never been able to understand that. He couldn't read a book for five minutes without wanting to fall asleep. Then he talked about what a good friend and brother Ponyboy had been. He sobbed as he talked about the time Pony had tried to save all his money so Sodapop could by his horse, Mickey Mouse.

Jenna led him away from the podium and held him as he cried. He watched Darry. His face was pained but there were no tears. He stood with his hands shoved in his pockets and gazed forward. Sodapop wondered how he could be so hard, but then he remembered. He hadn't cried at their parent's funeral either. Sodapop had bawled like a baby, but at least he had Ponyboy there with him then.

They were lowering him into the ground though, next to their mother. "_He would have liked that,"_ Sodapop thought, sadly. Being the youngest, Ponyboy had been a little bit of a Mama's boy. She had been crazy about him too. Sodapop couldn't get away with anything with her but Ponyboy; he could have gotten away with murder. Murder…

Sodapop clenched his fists. His little brother had been murdered, left to die alone in the trunk of a car and then thrown into the cold, dark ground with no ceremony, like his life had been worth nothing. Sodapop really hoped that he was never left alone with those Socs. If he was, he would be the one behind bars and they would be six feet under.

Later, at the reception it seemed as if someone had read his very thoughts because Tim Shepard took him aside to tell him that he had written to his brother in prison about what had happened. "Curly always said he was a good kid. I remember when I had to bust their heads together, the two dumbasses were playing chicken with the ends of cigarettes," he took a drag of his own cancer stick. "I imagine he'll be telling Dallas about this and he and the boys will make sure those punks have a real warm welcome, dig?"

Sodapop didn't know anyone who still talked like that except hood rats like Tim but he had caught his meaning well enough. The minute Pony's murderers hit the yard; they were in for a beating or worse. He also knew that he couldn't tell Darry. There was nothing, he knew, that either of them wanted more than their brother to get justice for what had happened to him but Darry was also a cop. Unfortunately that meant no involvement for him. Sodapop was about to say something but Tim was gone. Steve was standing in his place.

"You okay man? How you holding up?" He asked.

"My brother's dead Steve, how do you think I'm holding up?" Sodapop retorted. He still could not get over the permanence of the situation. His brother was supposed to come back, Sodapop had been waiting for him to come back.

"He's been gone twenty-seven years Soda, aint it about time you got over him?" Steve asked. Before his lips even closed on the last word, Sodapop lost it. He dove on his best friend, punching him in the face. They rolled on the ground.

"Shut up Randle. You just shut up. You never liked him anyway. What do you know?"

Steve rolled on top of him, pinning him to the ground, his callus hands pressing hard against Soda's shoulders. His green eyes glared and he scowled. "The kid was annoying as hell, always tagging along, and making smart ass comments. There were times I wanted to beat the shit out of him." Steve's scowl lessened and he looked suddenly sad too. "He was like my little brother too. I miss him." He muttered softly as Two-Bit and Darry rushed to pull them off each other.

"What in the world are you two doing?" Darry sounded royally pissed. Soda flushed red as he took his brother's hand. "You're both forty-three years old. This is a funeral, show some respect, will you?"

Steve grunted, wiping dirt from his suit. "We just had to sort some things out." He tilted his head and held his hand out for Soda's. "You good buddy?"

Good, he probably wouldn't be good ever again. He knew Steve hadn't meant to upset him. Steve knew very well what was going on, he had always understood what Sodapop had felt. Unfortunately he had always lacked the sensitivity to get the right words out. He was just worried. Sodapop plastered on a fake grin. "Yeha, I'm good."

From behind Steve, Two-Bit laughed. "Fighting already? One heck of a party, the kid would have loved it." He was right. Ponyboy would have hated the solemn occasion. If he were here, he'd have wanted it to be like this, like old times.

"He'd hate seeing us like this," a quiet voice called as Johnny emerged from the house, clutching a can of Pepsi, his brother's favorite drink. Out of all of them, Johnny seemed to be taking this the best. He and Ponyboy had been best friends, sharing a silent bond. For the first few months after his brother's disappearance, Johnny had been a nervous wreck. As time went by, that had turned into a quiet resolve to move on, and to grow, doing all Ponyboy wasn't doing. He had accepted Pony's death long before the rest of them, and chose to live where he could not. Sodapop had secretly hated him for that.

Sodapop looked at his old friends and then past the backyard. He could see the edge of the house built where their old vacant lot had been. How many Saturdays had they spent their playing football? He remembered how Darry had always been on Ponyboy and Johnny's team. They hadn't really needed him. Pony had always been unusually fast, just not fast enough to get away from those Socs.

He sighed. His little brother had some happy times there and here with his friends. He would have wanted the fun times to continue. Sodapop grimaced at this thought and sighed. He forced another grin. "He'd have hated all this casserole food, remember when mom and dad died? He just about gagged from it," Sodapop said and then looked at his older brother. "You got the stuff for a chocolate cake Darry?"

Darry's eyebrows scrunched up for a moment as if in thought. Then he smiled. "He'd like that, come in guys. We have a cake to bake."

A day later found Sodapop laying a piece of that cake, a glass Pepsi bottle and a pack of smokes at the edge of the movie theater turned playhouse. Flowers and old stuffed toys already lined the walkway. The murder had happened twenty-seven years ago. He doubted if most people really cared about his brother. To them he was just a kid who had died too soon and that was enough to remember.

He looked at his twins, standing nervously at the corner. Holly and Ivy were born on Christmas Eve and named for his wife's favorite Christmas song. They were his pride and joy. He clenched his fists. If anyone dare hurt them, like they had his brother, there would be no holding back. He would kill that person.

The twins walked over and he put an arm around each of them. "Your uncle Pony loved this place. I don't think he ever went a week without seeing one or two movies."

Beside him, Holly sighed. "What is it Little Bit?" he asked. Holly pulled away. She looked at the theater. "Anna Fisher said that the drama group practiced here. It was haunted dad, by a ghost. She said she saw him. There was a piece of set that fell, almost killed a girl but the ghost pushed her out of the way. Anna said he was a kid about our age. Do you think it was Uncle Pony?"

Did he think it was his brother? Did he even want it to be? The thought of his little brother trapped forever in a cold dark theater without his friends and brothers for company, scared Sodapop. The thought that he could have seen his brother any time if he had just come to the theater, perturbed him. No, he didn't want that.

He gave Ivy a one armed hug and motioned for Holly to come over. "I don't know kid, I just don't know."

"He's not there now. Nobody's seen him since Uncle Darry came to the house," Holly added. "It's like he just vanished."

Sodapop looked at the theater. He felt a cool wind blow soothingly against his cheek. He could almost hear his brother calling his name. His eyes watered. "Its cause if its him, he aint there no more Little Bit.

Holly moved closer to her father. "No?" she asked.

Sodapop shook his head. "Always had his head in the clouds couldn't be on time for anything. Took him awhile but he's finally home from the movies. Mom and dad must be really happy."

"You think so dad," Ivy asked him softly. She reminded him so much of his little brother, always reading and looking at sunsets.

"Yeha," Sodapop said, "I do." For the first time, since Darry had come over to tell him about their brother, Sodapop felt truly happy and at peace.


End file.
